Thursday, January 28, 2016

As is fairly obvious to people who've seen my homepage, I take quite a lot of photographs. While I'm a big fan of using file system hierachies to categorise information, and it's fundamental to the way my Gallery software works, there are nuances that are hard to represent with a single hierachy.

For years, I've used f-spot to maintain a tagged database of my photos, which makes various queries a lot simplere. Of course, f-spot has always been annoyingly buggy, and is now essentially dead and increasingly suffering from bit-rot. The official replacement, shotwell, is nice enough, unless you're the sort of person you cares about how the data is actually stored in the database, in which case it's not for you. (I shall not eloborate - the curious can easily shotwell's behaviour themselves). Since I'm the sort of that does care, shotwell's out. There is digikam, but Ive never hit it off with the KDE design philosophy, so that doesn't work well for me either.

Which of course leaves the traditional solution to minor inconviences with other people's software. Re-inventing the wheel. This does have a number of advantages. I can have something that just has the features I want, and drop a lot of stuff, such as all the image editing functionality, that there are better tools for. Furthermore, by writing in python 3, using gobject introspection and a pre-release of SQLObject, I can justify it both as a learning exercise (since I hadn't previously gotten beyond toy gtk3 programs), and also as testing SQLObject 3.

The net result of all this is Phototagger , something I'd actually decided to write in 2014 (but then as a python 2 program), but then didn't do any work on for more than a year, and which now represents far too much of my free time over the last month and a half or so.

There was a point early on where the actual code design was reasonably neat, but stuff got tangled as I worked around some questionable early choices without addressing the underlying problem, so a rewrite is on the cards at some point, but it now works pretty nicely.

The features are nothing special - photos can be added, tagged, tags can be edited and have various images assigned to them, and all that sort of thing. The search functionality is a bit limited - it doesn't allow constructing arbitary tag queries, but it covers the sort of queries I generally need.

Indivual photos can be viewed

And zoomed - this also supports mouse panning, which took a surprisingly long time to get right due to a misreading of the Gtk documentation.

As a learning experience, it was pretty useful. I got to play with some of the new Gtk 3 widgets, such as the Stack and FlowBox widgets, which are nifty, and work through some of the changes between Gtk 2 and Gtk 3. It's also given me a fair amount of confidence in SQLObject's python 3 support, although it doesn't stress the limits of SQLObject particularly.

As a tagging tool, it's now functional enough to replace f-spot for me, and has proved a great deal more stable. I now just need to rewrite a bunch of the tools I wrote to managing my f-spot database easier, and then I can finally move on.